Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Tuesday, July 05, 2016

The Bestseller Code: The words that make a successful book

'Need', 'want' and 'do' are twice as likely to appear in bestselling books than others

Good news for budding authors needing a little hand in writing that best-selling book: there’s now a formula for writing successful novels. Well, it won’t help you write the whole book, but it may help you get on the right track.

Former acquisitions editor for Penguin UK, Jodie Archer, and associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Matthew Jockers, have been compiling data for the last five years, trying to find out what makes a bestseller.

After analysing 20,000 randomly selected novels from the past three decades, the pair worked out what makes a book ‘successful’ (i.e. one that has appeared in The New York Times bestseller list).MORE